RSR468 - Andy Freeman - Producing Rock & Roll and Helping to Save Home Studios in Music City

Recording Studio Rockstars

"1000 burritos, tacos, and Bud Lights came flying at me like the arrows in 300!" Andy talked about recording Andrew WK from a mobile truck, doubling vocals like Mahler, learning to listen, recording Cuban music, guitars, vocals, and tuning drums.

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My guest today is Andy Freeman who got his hands on a console at age 12 and at age 21 got his first job in audio, recording and editing voice over artists in Atlanta. In 2002, after a friend asked if he produced bands, Andy said yes.

This was a lie. But he hasn’t stopped producing and mixing bands since then, so I guess it was a good lie.

Learning on the job at his own studio in Atlanta, he and his wife Malie [“Molly”] moved to San Francisco in 2008, then to Los Angeles in 2015, then to Nashville in 2017 where he works out of a full tracking and mixing space in his house.

Andy doesn’t hear music in genre, preferring the idea that there are only two kinds of music: good and bad. Consequently he’s been able to work with just about anyone. Jason Hawk Harris, Ace Monroe, Leeann Skoda, Eisley, and lots of fun San Francisco bands you have never heard of. He also made a lot of live recordings in his time rambling around the country in a mobile recording truck with Bay Area Tone. They include Andrew WK, Carney, The Bravery, The Sounds, Niko Case… Anyway, if there’s passion and determination, he wants to be involved.

Oh, and he likes real stuff. Like real people in a real room playing real instruments while being really inspired by each other's presence. If you work with him, he will spend an awful lot of time talking about energy and flow and stuff like that. Because he wants to know who you are as an artist, he’ll use words like “identity” and “impact” and “deliberate” and he will frequently ask you why you’re doing what you’re doing when you could be doing something else. He believes in tube amps, consoles, tape machines, analog hardware, and doing it the hard way. He will make a record in Pro Tools but he doesn’t like it, and he refuses to learn how to program because let’s face it, everybody else can already do better than he could anyway.

He also doesn’t like writing in the third person. He thinks it’s weird.

Importantly to me Andy teamed up with Mark Rubel in 2020 to create a GoFundMe page to help me save home studios in Music City, which we did. It was probably the greatest honor I've ever received in music. So thanks Andy! https://www.gofundme.com/f/nashville-says-039thank-you039-lij-shaw

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Listen to this guest's discography on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4Xdwuuxil9TNDbnWErSZgW?si=c49306f760904440

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